Not to be confused with fixing 404 broken link errors on your website, Broken Link-Building is actually about identifying websites that have links to content similar to yours and examining them for any broken links.
If you find a broken link, you can convince the site owners to replace it with your own content. This method definitely get’s a lot of attention in the SEO community, but it may be outdated, and not as effective as it once was.
SEO professional Sam Oh, also VP of Marketing at Ahrefs, ran a study where he sent out 74 outreach emails to web admins who had broken links. Four of the emails “bounced,” meaning they didn’t reach the webmaster at all. Five webmasters responded, but only one website gave Oh a link to their blog. Sam reported that this was a 1.4% conversion rate.
In our opinion, this is a rather low success rate, based on the amount of time it took to not only scope out the broken links, but then to reach out to the webmasters to persuade them to replace the broken links with your own content.
Regardless, we think this is still a method worth trying, and the fact that Oh got a link shows that it does work. We just wouldn’t look at this method as a fast way to get backlinks.